I stop listening to them: they annoy me. They are going to sleep together. They know it. Each of them knows that the other knows it. But as they are young, chaste, and decent, as each wants to keep his self-respect and that of the other, and as love is a great poetic thing which mustn’t be shocked, they go several times a week to dances and restaurants, to present the spectacle of their ritualistic, mechanical dances . . .

Nausea (Jean-Paul Sartre)